5 ms·

I think you might underestimate the scale here. It's more like, it's "always on, in all regions, with as many providers as they can". This is a company that's

by bbarn 10y ago

I think you might underestimate the scale here. It's more like, it's "always on, in all regions, with as many providers as they can". This is a company that's had to innovate in basically every possible business space it can to keep delivering what it has been.

tracker1 10y ago
It's also not entirely static, there's a lot of checks in place because of licensing models, and beyond that there's different encoding and quality levels of streams to support various clients.
- jaytaylor 10y ago
  I understand the site isn't static, but fundamentally what they are serving are static video streams. Encoding for video streams of varying quality levels is entirely pre-computed, and thus seem like static assets. Anyways, my gripe is that I am not seeing the good reason(s) for not having a working failover plan ready to go at all times for the service driving a publicly traded company. Even scale doesn't seem like a good reason, as I'm sure Google GCE would love to get a few slices of the Netflix pie. So I'm just left perplexed..
  - mioelnir 10y ago
    The video streams are delivered from their OpenConnect appliances. The video encoding, their actual website and all the client interaction is run in AWS, active/active in three regions (and multiple availability zones per region). The AWS part is also very dynamic, at any given time most customers are (unknowingly/behind the scenes) participating in 8-10 beta features. That said, this is all based on talks and presentations they have given at various conferences in the past. It could be different, especially some AWS parts.
  - teraflop 10y ago
    Obviously they do have a failover plan, but no plan is infallible -- especially when it involves a complex distributed software system plus human decision-making. You never notice all the times when the failover is executed smoothly with no interruption in service, just the times when something goes wrong.
    - seanp2k2 10y ago
      And I promise that there are fail overs, simulations, testing, smaller issues, moving loads around, etc happening all the time behind the scenes. Getting caught out is no fun, but it's a very low percentage of the times when changing the tires on the bus driving down the freeway just goes [mostly] without a hitch.

by bbarn 10y ago

tracker1 10y ago

It's also not entirely static, there's a lot of checks in place because of licensing models, and beyond that there's different encoding and quality levels of streams to support various clients.

jaytaylor 10y ago
I understand the site isn't static, but fundamentally what they are serving are static video streams. Encoding for video streams of varying quality levels is entirely pre-computed, and thus seem like static assets. Anyways, my gripe is that I am not seeing the good reason(s) for not having a working failover plan ready to go at all times for the service driving a publicly traded company. Even scale doesn't seem like a good reason, as I'm sure Google GCE would love to get a few slices of the Netflix pie. So I'm just left perplexed..
- mioelnir 10y ago
  The video streams are delivered from their OpenConnect appliances. The video encoding, their actual website and all the client interaction is run in AWS, active/active in three regions (and multiple availability zones per region). The AWS part is also very dynamic, at any given time most customers are (unknowingly/behind the scenes) participating in 8-10 beta features. That said, this is all based on talks and presentations they have given at various conferences in the past. It could be different, especially some AWS parts.
- teraflop 10y ago
  Obviously they do have a failover plan, but no plan is infallible -- especially when it involves a complex distributed software system plus human decision-making. You never notice all the times when the failover is executed smoothly with no interruption in service, just the times when something goes wrong.
  - seanp2k2 10y ago
    And I promise that there are fail overs, simulations, testing, smaller issues, moving loads around, etc happening all the time behind the scenes. Getting caught out is no fun, but it's a very low percentage of the times when changing the tires on the bus driving down the freeway just goes [mostly] without a hitch.